Email app UX (bottom posting, delete reply text, `text/plain`, attempt unsubscribe)

Feature Requests
#1

Netiquette, especially on mailing lists (as an example with MediaWiki & useplaintext.email), have long dictated that top posting is bad & bottom posting should always be preferred since it doesn’t require jumping up / down to read. However when a user goes to compose a message not only is it top posting by default, but there is no option to configure it or anything related to replies… or at least a button to wipe reply message to make it easier. Additionally, reading email seems to prefer text/html over text/plain the user cannot swap to the text/plain view if an email sends both content types; if we consider that the app wisely defaults to not showing images (since they are usually full of trackers), the default reading experience is often just a page full of broken image links which is less desirable than a monospace font with no images or colored backgrounds.

The K-9, FOSS Android email client, UX has

  • Settings → $ACCOUNT → Sending mail → Reply after quoted text (bottom posting)
  • “×” on the reply block to completely delete the > reply block from the previous message

As a bonus not seen in K-9 (but available in others like aerc), is reading the email headers for List-Unsubscribe & using it to provide a fast way for users to unsubscribe from the automatic spam from many services (some emailns provide a mailto:, others an https: link).

2 Likes
#2

I have been using email for about 25 years.
Never in my life have i seen any significant share of people conforming to those standards. So while, in principle, they are nice things to adhere to - i think we must accept that this ship has sailed long ago and isn’t coming back.

3 Likes
#3

I’ve never heard of those “standards” let alone encountered anyone that’d actually care about them :grin: The only time I’ve seen it broken down that way is when I’m browsing mailing lists on the web. I think I’d get pretty annoyed if I got a reply to an email and I had to scroll past mine just to hunt for anything they’d be replying to. I find it a bit amusing that it is being asserted as netiquette when basically every modern mail client I’ve seen puts replies on top of the content you’re replying to.

I would agree though that it’d be nice to have an unsubscribe option.

1 Like
#4

Microsoft Outlook was to blame for this UX ‘change’, but most open source mailing clients have retained the ability to configure the option since it is a requirement for using many mailing lists. I don’t subscribe to many lists, but there are a few & replying from a phone is very difficult without this given the text editing/navigation capabilities of a small screen.

scroll down

You don’t actually quote to keep the entire history in every email–you pick out the relevant bits you want to remark on & remove the rest. Since you already have the previous message, it’s not really useful to have multiple copies of the entire thread filling your finite inbox space–which is what the mailing lists are trying to avoid.